The Ghost of Shelly Silver

Sheldon Silver was convicted of corruption, booted from the Assembly and is likely headed for the Big House. But he hasn’t lost all his political clout.

Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, for one, says she’s “confident” she’ll be reelected this fall, even though she stuck by Silver.

Glick defended the thenspeaker even after his indictment last year, saying, “Obviously, [Silver’s] been upholding Democratic principles.” She cited his support for women’s issues and the teachers union — as if that excused his sleaze.

Earlier, she’d stood by him after he basically admitted covering up sexharassment charges against thenAssemblyman Vito Lopez. Indeed, she even reportedly threatened a GOP colleague who’d called for Silver to step down: “You should quiet down before someone starts playing games with you,” she told Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis.

Labor lawyer Arthur Schwartz is running against Glick in the Democratic primary. He says he’s trying to oust someone “who enabled [the exspeaker’s] corruption.”

But Silver’s power lingers most in his old district. There, both his wife and his longtime top aide, Judy Rapfogel (whose own hubby, William Rapfogel, served time for looting the charity he ran), joined party bosses Sunday in picking Alice Cancel as the Democratic candidate in the special election to replace Silver.

Cancel actually praised the “wonderful things” Silver did for the district. Hello? The guy is a convicted felon.

It all goes to show, as Manhattan GOP Chairwoman Adele Malpass said, “how deep corruption runs” in the district’s clubhouses.

The district’s heavily Democratic, so Cancel’s odds of winning aren’t bad — though YuhLine Niou, shut out by the machine, may run on the Working Families line.

Niou called the process, where bosses essentially choose the lawmaker, undemocratic. Yep — and that’s the least of it.